Life in Syntropy: Reversing Degenerative Practice
For this piece, I want to offer a bit more on the broader application of the syntropic approach to regenerative practice, whether that’s in community land development, your own backyard, or your way of relating to the wider world.
A Loose Definition of Syntropy
Syntropy, also referred to as negative entropy, is the life-bearing, life-enhancing, self-organizing pattern that nature operates from to sustain itself and every living organism within it. All living systems carry mechanisms working toward syntropy at the cellular level. Entropy, by contrast, is more of a human construct, talking about entropy is really just talking about what life isn’t.
Applied to how we think, this shows up as syntropic, life-affirming patterns, abundance, peace, collaboration built on trust, or entropic patterns, scarcity, lack, competition built on fear. These two opposing principles shape how we relate to life, how life relates to us, and how we navigate with the resources we actually have.
The Origins of Syntropic Agroforestry
Syntropic Agroforestry was formulated through decades of direct observation and direct experience on the land, drawing on indigenous wisdom still held by people living with that knowledge today in Central and South America. That wisdom has been kept alive because it works, and it’s resurfacing now as industrial agriculture proves itself unsustainable. Fittingly, the birthplace of this particular work is Brazil, the same country carrying some of the world’s highest deforestation now also giving rise to one of its wisest approaches to reforestation.
The Status Quo of Degenerative Farming
Our current farming situation runs on an entropic system that’s outdated and, quite literally, degenerative. The industrialized food paradigm most supermarkets rely on comes from a dependency-based system that disempowers farmers from developing the natural knowledge needed to grow nutrient-dense food in abundance.
It leaves people operating from fear, fear about money, about retaining a mortgage, about the need to produce profit, an emotional and mental orientation built on scarcity. Natural knowledge, though, can never actually be eliminated from our connection to nature, which is the opposite of that scarcity: permanence.
Working With the Natural Order: Forest Dynamics
Natural processes can be altered, and people can be distracted, but life is life. You can mess with it, but the underlying processes stay the same.
Looking at innovative food systems like regenerative agriculture, biodynamics, and successional food forestry, these are the systems that offer real empowerment for the farmers of the future. Feeding life back to the soil, through bio-ferts, microbe-rich compost, and forest dynamics, builds soil that’s genuinely rich in life, the foundation everything else depends on.
The real benefit of including forest dynamics lies in the root networks trees create, something annual vegetables simply aren’t built for. Trees play an essential role in nutrient cycling and distribution, building healthy hydrological cycling and building the humus layer through their leaf droppings. They’re highly efficient communication nodes throughout the soil web, with an interoperability that annual plants don’t have.
Regeneration, Not Just “Climate Action”
A lot of climate movements and environmentalism operate from a place of fear, fear of running out of resources, fear of catastrophe. I’m not saying industrial consumer society isn’t responsible for real pollution and degradation, it clearly is. My point is that a fear-and-control-based paradigm isn’t part of the solution, because it doesn’t actually speak to regeneration, reforestation, or shifting our consumption habits toward conscious balance with nature.
Worth asking yourself honestly: is fear driving your current motivations to take action? Are fear, lack, despair, and scarcity driving how you relate to life? If so, you’re operating from a belief system that isn’t your own, one that profits from keeping you in that same scarcity mindset.
Life, seen through the lens of Syntropy, is actually lush, loving, supportive, and nurturing. I see real reason for the future of food to be genuinely prosperous.
Beyond Farming: A Way of Thinking
Syntropic farming is really much more than a farming system, it can expand into a way of thinking and a way of approaching life. Studying nature and the syntropy within it offers real insight into how we might grow and feel more enriched in our own lives.
Observing how nature moves from grassland to complex rainforest can show us where we need to change, though that’s also where the harder part comes in, since we carry emotions and memories shaped by our own experiences. Adopting syntropic thinking meant realizing I’d been seeing and processing life through a pre-programmed set of entropic beliefs. Believing weeds are “bad,” for instance, is a fear-based, control-based idea, as if nature would work against itself. “Weed” is a human-made judgment, not a description, every plant has a species and a function within its system. Comfrey, for example, has a deep taproot that brings minerals up from deep in the soil, made bioavailable the moment it’s chopped and dropped.
What Syntropy taught me is that every element in life has a function, and once we understand that function in relation to the larger system, we know how to work with it rather than against it. Life only ever collaborates, it works to create more life, more abundance, more support, more water, more carbon in the soil, more everything that sustains more life.
If we changed our perception and recognized nature as a great ally, a great inspiration, we would really change the way we behave towards the planet.
Pedro Diniz, CEO Fazenda da Toca
Humanity has largely been conditioned to believe that operating from fear, and needing to be in control, is how we stay safe. The origins of that pattern are human-made, and only a real shift in mindset and behavior can meet it.
If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make the change.
Michael Jackson
What It Takes
Are you willing to actually look? I know it can be confronting, but without getting real with ourselves, we don’t get free, we don’t thrive, and we don’t offer the next generation something better than what we received.
We’re part of life. If a tree lacks certain nutrients in its early development, we call it deficient. As humans, we carry needs beyond nutrition too, emotional and otherwise, and if we didn’t get certain things as children, we’ll keep looking for them as adults, especially if what we actually got was the opposite of what we needed. That’s the real work: if the root is in deficiency, the deficiency stays until we actively go there ourselves.
The world doesn’t strictly need to change, life on Earth can do quite well without us. What we actually need is to change ourselves internally, and from there, the rest stops being merely “sustainable” and becomes genuinely regenerative, restorative, next-level.
Closing Thoughts
The entropic emotional state so much of humanity operates from right now, fear, lack, control, scarcity, rush, hurry, stifles our natural ability to love, to care, and to take regenerative action. When we turn down the noise of a world that feels like it’s unraveling and step into our own power as earth regenerators, we get to nurture others through our own inspired action.
Change always takes real effort. Our willingness to adapt, and to orient ourselves toward regenerative practice throughout our lives, is what brings us back into the flow of life, with life, with nature. That’s Life in Syntropy.
In the spirit of regeneration,
Souvereign